The present embodiments relate to relocating medical data in a computer network having a number of storage nodes connected via data transfer channels.
In the medical imaging domain, hospitals use a high amount of structured and unstructured data, both from multi-vendor standards, like DICOM, and vendor specific standards. Cloud based approaches allow novel evaluations and calculations on the above data. There are main parameters that define aspects of a chosen cloud solution (e.g., operational pricing, transfer latency and data services). However, a cloud solution and a datacenter provider are chosen initially often based on a business strategy.
All these strategies assume some stability over time. Nevertheless, technical properties of datacenters vary over time. Novel technical solutions emerge and datacenters may compete on the marketplace. Accordingly, datacenters offer different technical services and pricings. Consequently, higher availability, faster transfer speed, or lower costs may be realized if the datacenter provider may be changed on the fly. A technical implication of not changing the provider may be the unavailability of dedicated services and higher latency so that a potential decrease in costs on-site is not realized.
Therefore, a hospital uses an online overview of technical capabilities and prices on the market place that fits to their own storage solution and business model. However, an automatic gathering of technical or pricing information from the Internet is often not possible. Consequently, automatically relocating of medical data is technically not feasible at reasonable efforts and costs. For the individual hospital, it is time-consuming and expensive to compare technical conditions, contracts, and pricings of a multitude of datacenter providers in order to provide technical standards, since this comparison requires a lot of manual work.
Sometimes, information on services and pricing is published in an unstructured way by datacenter providers, such as text on multiple web pages. Thus, relocation of the data to a different datacenter provider is a technically cumbersome procedure today. Therefore, a missing datacenter relocation or application integration option leads to technical blocking points and a vendor-lock-in situation, by which the hospital is bound to the datacenter provider. The vendor-lock-in is caused by the database technology and computer services provided by the datacenter.